Home-made Oil finish?

A friend gave me this recipe for home-made oil finish for rustic furniture.
2 parts Linseed Oil
1 part Mineral Turpentine
1 part vinegar
My question is which vinegar ?
The dark brown or white.
Does it matter?
Can I try both to see which looks best?
I will be using on white pine and gum tree.
Thanks,
Tana

This recipe is a variant of the well-known "salad dressing" furniture
treatment. It's intended for cleaning or restoring the finish on
existing pieces, not for finishing new timber from scratch.
It's not a good finish for new work and I wouldn't use it. It's
basically raw linseed oil, which you could use just as well on its own.
Linseed oil has uses for "rustic" work like these
http://codesmiths.com/shed/things/boxes/forsale /
but it also has drawbacks. It goes very yellow with age (OK on pine,
terrible on maple). It's also not a good "drying" oil, so you must
apply it in extremely thin layers and even then you can sometimes have
trouble getting it to cure well.
As a furniture restorer, then this mixture is effective but a little
crude. Don't go slathering it around on fine work - it doesn't do much,
and what it does do tends to involve leaving linseed behind to go
yellow afterwards. It also builds up after many uses (I think the
Winterthur collection had a problem with this) into a thick "peanut
butter" that's hard to remove.

Plainest, simplest unflavoured spirit vinegar you can find. Good for
cleaning glass too.

Vinegar???? How are you going to keep it mixed, by adding
lecithin?
Sure that wasn't supposed to be _varnish_?
A common formula for homemade wiping varnish is equal parts,
by volume, of oil, thinner, and oil-based varnish.
Others prefer a higher proportion of solids, up to a 1-2-3
ratio, one part oil, two parts solvent, three parts varnish.
Don't substitute water-based 'varnish'.
Basicly these mixes are thinned long-oil varnishes, probably
not much different from thinning spar varnish.

diesel fuel is translucent. I have a diesel generator in a wooden
enclosure, and there is a "diesel fuel finish" on the bottom. It looks
waxy and translucent.
I myself wanted to use motor oil for wood finish (on some outdoor pieces),
but never got to actually doing that...
i

but never got to actually doing that... <<
Not good at all for your backside. As a young man we used diesel fuel
for form break treatment when we were pouring lots of concrete.
Then we used motor oil thinned with gas if we ran out of that.
It was the only time we really needed to wear gloves as we got a red,
irritated burn on our hands from working with the forms after
treatment.
Robert

G'day all,
The farm house in which I lived as a kid, was constructed from clad with
Jarrah (Rough Sawn) boards up to about 5 feet high with the top portion
being asbestos sheeting.................
Every year we used to get an old mop and give the boards a good coating
of sump oil.(Which the old man would save from the oil changes in the
cars, tractors and other machinery).
I'd reckon that them boards would still be as good as new, although very
black.
Would get a nasty stain on your trousers, I assume, if it was used for
furniture.
Regards
John

John, just the thought of the reaction on the face of one of our California
inspectors, on seeing that house, made my morning!
I bet the paint was made with lead, too. Funny how we try to keep everyone
safe. Farm life in Oz certainly has different risks than city life in
California...
Thanks for posting.
Patriarch

G'day Patriarch,
Today I'm sure it would give our local health and safety officers heart
attacks ;)
I'd say the paint was lead based. It was a gloss oil paint, green. With
the roof being corrugated iron painted silver.
My Grandfather was in charge of the water supply in Kalgoorlie and used
to visit the farm every Xmas, about 1000 ks travel. He "sourced" the
paint. Strange coincidence, the Silver Frost was the same colour as the
water supply used for it's pipelines and all their buildings were
painted green ??? :)
John

my guess is that it doesn't matter.. a friend that does butcher block uses about
the same thing, but with lemon oil instead of the vinegar... I think that would
be my choice, also..
Personally, my skill level doesn't include making my own finishes... there are
so many proven commercial ones out there that I'd rather spend my time
developing other skills.. YMMV
mac
Please remove splinters before emailing

FWIW, you can easily take commercial finishes and adjust them to
suit your own needs. Probably the simplest and my favorite is to take
spar varnish and thin it with equal parts turpentine and BLO. It makes
a great wiping varnish that is easier to use (and easier to control the
level of buildup) than the stuff straight out of the can.
You can also play around with substituting tung oil for BLO, and by
adjusting the levels of solvent vs. varnish vs. oil, you can achieve
different results.
With any finish, experiment on scrap first or you *will* be
experimenting on the real thing (tmPaullyRad).
Chuck Vance (BTDT, got the t-shirt)

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